


Echoes

by Laurea



Category: Persona 2
Genre: M/M, Other, Romance, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:33:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5418935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurea/pseuds/Laurea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at what the battles in Persona 2 meant from the perspective of the Collective Unconscious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarsDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarsDragon/gifts).



Deep in the nothingness of chaos, surrounded by the glittering sparks of billions of tiny souls, a streak of pale blue light rose in a brightening spiral. What had been nothing took shape, soared up through emptiness and turned it to a stretch of space. Golden pillars reached up to the heaven, marking a place where existence could be possible.

The blue light twirled between them, a glimmering butterfly that wove in and out between the columns. Shadows and light flickered between the columns as it flew, and the pattern bled out into black and white squares that spilled out into a solid floor. The butterfly flickered forth into the space, blue light flaring, and from it a foot touched down on the chessboard floor.

The figure walked with deliberate slowness across the circle, growing more distinct with every step, until a black-clad man with a flowing brown ponytail stopped in the center of the newly formed space. He looked up, a white mask settling on his face as the light of souls above him shone down. He opened his mouth, and sound whispered forth to drown out the silence.

“And so it starts again.”

* * *

There was chaos, and then there was not. The golden pillars of the gazebo bridged two stretches of ordered reality, sprawling in opposite tracks from the central point. They mirrored one another, the same and not the same, each housing victory and defeat in equal measure.

The masked man stood in the chessboard at the center, watching himself as he entered a shadow of this place in each of the twin worlds. He heard the words that he spoke to each of the groups gathered before him, the tiny firefly souls that sparkled just a little brighter than the others in the worlds could.

“I am Philemon. Have you forgotten me?”

They had forgotten, of course. Such ephemeral creatures could not encompass the nature of their own existence, let alone approach the knowledge of all that swirled around them. They saw only the scraps of order fluttering in the void, and they did not grasp how such things could blur in and out of existence.

And when another being approached the flickering souls, they did not understand. They saw a mockery of a dead father, or a false double of a friend, or a demonic monster exploding into shadows, and they believed their senses could comprehend the totality of the being.

“He is the Crawling Chaos,” he told them. “Nyarlathotep.”

The name rolled out past the tiny handful of souls, pouring across the worlds, a torrent of destruction howling with the screams of every spark it covered. One world burned in the aftermath while the other bloomed, and the raging tide of chaos roared away from the shuddering worlds to rush across the chessboard where Philemon stood. The dark squares writhed with the power of wild annihilation, no longer held back by the ordered pattern of glowing white interlocked with them.

Philemon did not move as the chessboard came to life beneath his feet, mired in a flood of chaos that tore at the threads of his existence. It clawed its way up his form, ripping at everything that let him cling to this scrap of physicality. Nothingness clutched at him with the obliterating pull of a black hole, ripping apart everything that it attracted.

And then it did not. Where the chaos had run rampant to drown out the tiny glitter of souls, new lights blazed up. The wild ocean thundered and raged, but the sparkling light of souls wrapped golden chains of reality around it until the form of something close to a man stood there among the columns, arms wrapped around Philemon and face buried against his neck.

“It does not end here,” Nyarlathotep hissed, and taloned fingernails scored bloody tracks down Philemon’s back before he ripped away, plunging back into the chaos around them on crimson wings.

And standing with blood on his skin, surrounded by glittering souls that shone from the ruin of shattered worlds, Philemon smiled.

* * *

Philemon left himself standing among the golden pillars, leaving the twin worlds behind as chaos parted around him. Souls glistened around him in jeweled beauty, each no more than a speck, but dazzling in the totality they created as they stretched into eternity.

He lifted a hand towards one heavenly spiral, and the soul his index finger touched grew more brilliant than the rest. It blazed with the blue light of the butterfly, and as it reflected back onto him, the brown hair cascading down his back seemed to bleed into the blue of the midnight sky.

His shoulders hunched as he walked onward, hands sliding into pockets as he watched another world unfold where his footsteps fell. The twin worlds still echoed throughout it, reverberating across the space it created, shaping what it was possible for this new world to be. The glittering souls rose and fell within in, swirling around the vivid note of blue, drawn along the patterns it spun.

And under the movements, in the shadow of the light of the souls, Philemon could see the dark chaos churning.

An echo could only follow the pattern of what came before, distorted through the differences of space and time. And so Philemon watched as the dance played out again – the rushing tide of destruction and the souls coming together to bring about its defeat.

The moon rose in the sky above it all, shadowing the world with its red and sickly mass. Philemon ran a finger along its swollen curves, and its demand for total annihilation sang in his head. He drew circles around it, a reminder of the mirrored worlds and their chains, and it wailed in protest.

Where it had taken ten souls and countless sacrifices to cast away the chaos, in this echoing world, one was enough. Brighter than the others, brilliant and gleaming, it pinned the writhing chaos into place, tethering it so that it could not be called down to devour this tiny world.

The moon shifted, bulging and twisting beneath Philemon’s fingers until his hand rested against a pale face. Wild yellow eyes looked into his as an unnatural grin split the young man’s face. He laughed, frenzied and too high, his long yellow scarf tangling around Philemon’s body with a mind of its own.

“One day you won’t win,” Nyarlathotep promised, before turning his head to press his mouth against Philemon’s palm. A blaze of a kiss, seared in place as fanged teeth gouged through flesh, and he was gone, leaving only the yellow scarf behind. It scorched Philemon’s skin like acid, leaving a long burn of a scar that curled around his torso and down his leg.

Philemon removed the scarf and let it dissolve back into nothingness, yellow dust fluttering away into the chaos that swirled around him. “Not today.”

* * *

As the yellow dust settled across existence, another world shifted and shuddered around the first. The echoes had grown fainter still, but they were not yet gone. Philemon tilted his head to hear them, and in doing so brushed against a silvery soul that had not been so intense until the world had changed. It shone against his face now, brighter and brighter still, and in its light his flowing hair bleached to gray.

The battle raged on again across the world, fighting and refighting a war already won. Philemon watched as the bilious yellow dust scattered across the world came together, absorbed into the only soul remaining that could shine enough to contain it. Pulsing yellow and steady silver danced around one another, spinning and dodging without fully connecting, and in the space stretching between them, Philemon could see the chaos spreading.

He relaxed into a confident pose, the chessboard spooling out along his collar as the meaningless fight continued. Nothing remained but the dying echo’s last gasping breath, and so not even a single soul had to be snuffed out in sacrifice to stop the chaos this time.

“Your victory is weakening.”

Philemon turned to see a man in a rumpled suit grinning at him from the other side of the world. The smile would have looked friendly, if it hadn’t been for the maddened yellow eyes glowing in his face. “So it is.”

Nyarlathotop stepped closer, and his shadow writhed in a thousand tentacled spirals where it fell across the world. “I will be unleashed again.”

Nyarlathotep stopped just out of Philemon’s reach, but the shadows did not. They snaked forward, rippling across worlds upon worlds as they circled Philemon. Dark tendrils slithered up his legs, around his waist, past his shoulders, down his wrists, wrapping him in the shrieking ruin of all existence that was never able to separate itself from what he represented.

And what were the shadows but chaos, and what was the chaos but Nyarlathotep’s very being? He twisted and tore at Philemon, surging close because it wasn’t in him to draw away. The siren call of destruction sang in and around Philemon’s being, intertwined with everything that he was. The shadows wrapped around him caressed as much as they struck, embracing even as they strangled.

Philemon raised his arms in turn, the limbs of this vestigial human form, and found that Nyarlathotep was already pressed against him. The chains of truth and hope and strength still bound him with brittle chains, and as Philemon’s hands settled on his shoulders, the chains blazed hot and blue. Nyarlathotep snarled with fury, and yanked Philemon to him in a devouring kiss.

The battle roared between them, violent and bright as it hadn’t been since Philemon’s last victory. A new struggle, a new challenge, a new fight between them had begun. And as they hung there in the middle of the wild nothingness of chaos, entwined and embattled and eternal, a new world spread itself out beneath their feet.


End file.
